DAVID: Yes, we have the same problem. Let's move on to another topic, which we alluded to earlier. How does your soon-to-be-announced electronic spread sheet, Multiplan, relate to VisiCalc? Is it better?

BILL: Oh, certainly. It's a second generation spread sheet product. We'll be really going into that in our literature and it's a huge promotion thing for usalmost equal to all the promotion we have done for the entire company in its history, just for this one product. But, I'll just mention two things that are critical in Multiplan.

The first is the use of naming. You are not put into a mode where you have to use "A10," "B9," "C14," and things like that, which you have to do with VisiCalc. If you want to say that taxes are 6% of sales then you say "taxes are .06 times sales." If you want the sum of all the profits you say "SUM (Profit)" and so we deal with data on a name basis which is the way people are used to dealing with it. The second thing is that we handle what we call Multisheet, which is a pretty obvious capability if you accept the analogy that these are spread sheet simulators. It is quite common to take numbers from, say, your cost sheet and your sales sheet and consolidate together. What you would really like is when you update the cost sheet it will carry over to the summary sheet. As soon as you look at the summary sheet, the information will be there. You don't have to type any commands or do any work every time you make the change to get the information over there. We have accommodated that capability.

One last thing, that I would like to mention also, is the way we have done the end-user interface. We've done away with slashes (/) and the need to know a lot of things about what is going on inside the package. For example, VisiCalc has a feature called "Order of Recalculation." The user has to think about does it go horizontally to recalculate or vertically to recalculate. Well that's ridiculous. It's up to the computer to figure out the order of recalculation and not force you to figure out how you have to order your data so that things propagate through in the right order. That's a very technical thing.

DAVID: Are you doing other end-user packages?

BILL: The second wave is Multichart and Multifile which is a data base and those will come out fairly quick in like three or four months, but anything beyond is easily six to nine months away.

DAVID: One thing you seem to be saying is that we are going to see a whole new set of application programs similar in concept to 8-bit programs only with a lot of improvements.